After sitting on the sidelines for months, the insurance industry has come out strongly
opposing
the latest Republican effort to repeat the ACA, the Cassidy-Graham-Heller-Johnson (CGHJ) bill. Yesterday, two
of the biggest insurance trade associations, Blue Cross Blue Shield and America's Health Insurance Plans,
announced their opposition to the bill. The American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association,
the American Cancer Society, and AARP are also against it. Their complaint is that the bill will destabilize
the insurance markets.

But that is not the worst of it. Marilyn Tavenner, the CEO of AHIP, is afraid that because the bill eliminates
all the subsidies that individuals get and gives them to the states in a single block grant, some of the states
might do something really scary: Implement Berniecare. If a state controlled by Democrats, such as California,
decided to have a single-payer insurance system, like Canada, it could just pass a law making medical care free
or almost free, and use the block grant to pay for it. The possibility of one or more states eliminating private
health insurance could start a trend the insurance industry looks at with dread. In addition, having to deal
with 50 state insurance and health systems is far more complicated for the industry than a single nationwide
system like the ACA.

At this point, it is far from sure that the 50 votes are there to pass the bill. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is a definite "no"
and Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) is a probable "no." If one other Republican senator votes against the bill it will die.
This puts enormous pressure on two of the Republican senators who voted against the "skinny repeal" in July,
Lisa Murkowski (AK), and John McCain (AZ).
The Republican leadership is going to
offer
Murkowski the sun, the moon, and the stars (and maybe throw in an aurora borealis to boot) to get her vote.
Among other items on the table would be to keep the ACA more or less intact in Alaska and Hawaii (the latter to make the pork trading
slightly less obvious) while decimating it in the other 48 states.
Another possibility is to change the formula by which the size of the block grants is determined to give Alaska far more than
its proportional share.
If Murkowski were to submit a wish list that would get her vote, it would be granted sight unseen. Although her appointment to the Senate was
very controversial (her father, the governor, appointed her to a vacant Senate seat), she has become one of the few senators who
thinks for herself and doesn't just do what she is told by her betters. She has repeatedly said that she works for the people of
Alaska, not for the Republican Party or the president. She's also warned that she's not open to a "buy my vote" arrangement, because
"Then you have a nationwide system that doesn't work." Getting her vote won't be easy.

The other tough nut to crack is McCain. He has an aggressive form of brain cancer and won't have many more votes in the Senate.
His legacy now is his vote against the skinny repeal bill in July. If he votes for the bill, his legacy will be that
of a flip-flopper with no principles.
He doesn't want that. On the other hand, one of the authors of the bill is Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), his best friend in the Senate
and not someone he wants to disappoint. So there is basically nothing the GOP establishment can do to buy his vote, as they can try to do
with Murkowski. It's his personal decision to make, and buying everyone in Arizona a new air conditioner won't help. (V)

When it comes to tax cuts, the GOP appears to have learned a lesson or two from
their struggles to repeal Obamacare. They are moving cautiously, discussing
options among themselves, and trying to build a consensus among members of the
party. Thus far, they seem to have
reached
agreement on two key points: (1) That their target is roughly $1.5 trillion in
tax cuts over the next 10 years, and (2) That they will use wildly
optimistic estimates for the economic growth that this will generate, as opposed
to the more realistic estimates provided by the Congressional Budget Office and
Joint Committee on Taxation.

Presumably, the second "compromise" was not a hard one to reach—Republicans
at least as far back as Ronald Reagan have peddled their tax cuts using
voodoo economics;
so of course they will do the same this time. As to the $1.5 trillion, that's a
more important sign of progress, but there's still a ways to go. GOP
leaders have not yet reached any sort of agreement on how they will balance the
budget (in other words, what spending will get cut), or exactly which taxes will
be reduced, or which tax breaks will be repealed, or whether their goal will be a
temporary or a permanent cut. These are all, arguably, more thorny issues than
the ones the Republicans have already ironed out. And, as we are still in the
preliminary discussion stages, there has yet to be any serious criticism or
opposition from whatever stakeholders would bear the burden of the GOP's
hypothetical plan. In other words, the
Koch Brothers
shouldn't break out the champagne quite yet. (Z)

A mysterious figure who keeps popping up in the Russiagate probe is a Russian emigre and two-time felon Felix Sater, who has ties
to shady Russians. Donald Trump downplays his connections to Sater, but his name keeps coming up. McClatchy
is reporting
that Trump's personal bodyguard, Gary Uher, is a former FBI agent who was involved in a complex deal to get Felix Sater back from his
native Russia in the late 1990s. Sater avoided prison by serving as a U.S. government informant.

Kathleen Clark, a Washington University law professor who specializes in government ethics and national security law, said this
revelation is yet another connection between Trump and Russian criminals.
Trump has denied knowing Sater very well, despite doing extensive business with the Bayrock Group, a company of which Sater was the managing director.
If Trump ever visited Bayrock to talk to Sater and took Uher along for security, surely Uher would have recalled that Trump's partner was a two-time
felon. Although it is not part of the job description for "bodyguard," he might have mentioned this tidbit to Trump.
The Trump organization didn't respond to questions about
whether Trump knew about Uher and his connection to Sater. After leaving the bureau, Uher was referred to Trump by Bernard Kerik, the
former one-time DHS secretary nominee who withdrew and was imprisoned in 2010 for tax fraud and lying to federal officials. (V)

Facebook reversed a previous decision yesterday and
agreed
to give Congress more than 3,000 ads bought by Russians during the election campaign.
Up until yesterday, Facebook said that it couldn't release the ads for privacy reasons, but suddenly privacy is not so important.
When announcing his new position, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said: "I don't want anyone to use our tools to undermine democracy."

In reality, Zuckerberg is aware that people on the left and on the right think Facebook and Google have too much power
and
should be regulated
like public utilities. Antagonizing Congress by not giving it information it wants to investigate the Russian hacking probably
would speed up the process of regulation, so Zuckerberg decided to give in on this one. (V)

After Donald Trump decided to rescind the DACA program, by which undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S.
as children can stay, a number of groups filed lawsuits. These suits generally made the same arguments: First, that the
Trump administration did not follow the proper administrative procedures and second, that when government promises something
to people and then changes its mind, that violates due process.

Yesterday a federal judge in San Francisco, William Alsup, who has a bachelors degree in mathematics as well as a law degree from
Harvard, and who was appointed to the federal bench by Bill Clinton, grouped together four of the cases and
said
he wanted the
legal briefs by December. He also said: "I don't like the idea that we're fiddling while Rome burns and suddenly the program is expired." (V)

Of all the various campaign promises that Donald Trump made, and has thus far failed up to live up to,
it's arguable that the one that has taken the harshest beating is his pledge to "drain the swamp." It is one
thing to make a promise and to merely fail to deliver (for example, the Mexican wall). It's another thing entirely
to promise something and then do the opposite, but that has certainly happened a lot on the swamp-draining front.

On Thursday came two more stories of a sort that we've now seen dozen of times. The first is that the President's
HHS Secretary, Tom Price, apparently quite enjoys living the high life on the government's dime. Since he took office
eight months ago, he has
traveled
by private, government-funded jet 24 times. Customarily, cabinet officials travel commercial, and only take a private plane
when there is no good commercial option. Certainly, that was the policy of the last two HHS secretaries,
Sylvia Mathews Burwell and Kathleen Sebelius. It is not Price's policy, however. For example, he could have bought a ticket
when traveling from D.C. to Nashville on June 6 for between $200 and $500. Instead, he took a private plane at a cost of $17,760.

Meanwhile, Trump is finally staffing up the USDA. But, according to an examination of 42 candidates by Politico,
most
don't actually have any experience relevant to the jobs they are being hired for. Some of them—including a long-haul
truck driver, a country club cabana attendant, and the owner of a scented-candle company—don't even have college degrees,
despite that ostensibly being a requirement for the level of federal job for which they are being hired. What the candidates do tend to
have in common, however, is that they worked on Trump's presidential campaign. Needless to say, the
spoils system has been a part of American politics
for two centuries, and Trump is far from the first president to give jobs to his friends, supporters, and other cronies.
However, most of them at least try to pick supporters who are reasonably qualified for their appointments, if for no
other reason than those people will be carrying out the president's agenda, and need to know how to do so.
It will be much harder to make America great again if the director of the Food Safety and Inspection Service
isn't entirely clear which end of the cow is the business side. (Z)

The good news is that Donald Trump has found a country whose health-care
system impresses him. During a speech at the U.N. on Thursday, he
expressed admiration
that, after all the problems they've faced, "Nambia's health system is
increasingly self-sufficient." The bad news is that Nambia is not actually a
country.

There are quite a few African countries that he could have been referring to,
among them Zambia, Gambia, Liberia, and the one the White House later claimed he actually
meant: Namibia. Obviously, everyone is entitled to a slip of the tongue or a typo,
but the problem here is that Trump used the incorrect name of the country twice in the speech,
and it was also rendered incorrectly in the original text distributed by the White House.
This makes it seem a lot less like a slip of the tongue, and a lot more like he and his staff
really don't know what they are talking about. Next time, the President should probably stick with
better-known
countries, like Botswanga, Bulungi, Equatorial Kundu, Mombaka, or Zamunda.

Because of the misspelling, meanwhile, an arguably more troubling passage in the speech has
passed without much notice. "Africa has tremendous business potential," said Trump. "I have so
many friends going to your countries, trying to get rich. I congratulate you. They're spending a lot of money."
That sounds an awful lot like something Theodore Roosevelt might say; in essence that the nations
of Africa are there waiting for white folks to plunder them. If that is indeed how Trump—who is
kind of the 21st century version of a robber baron—sees Africa, then it's certainly a different
vision from the one held by the last dozen or so presidents. (Z)

Roy Moore and Sen. Luther Strange (R-AL)
met
for the only debate they will have before Tuesday's runoff to decide who
will be the GOP candidate in the Dec. 12 election to permanently fill AG Jeff
Sessions' vacated Senate seat. The primary themes of the debate:

Who loves Donald Trump more?

Who is a more corrupt, swamp-dwelling insider: A career politician, or a career judge?

Is Moore unhinged?

Does Moore even know what he's talking about?

Is Strange just a tool of Speaker Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and the establishment?

Is Strange "soft" on the evils of homosexuality?

Was Strange's interim appointment a quid pro quo for dropping his investigation of the govenor?

Any Alabama Republican watching the debate almost had to come away feeling
like they were going to have to figure out which candidate is the less odious
option, since it is clear that both men have some serious flaws as candidates
(and, arguably, as people). If it is Donald Trump who carries the day—he's
got about a 55% approval rating in the state, better than he's doing anywhere
else outside Montana and the Dakotas—then Strange will have the upper hand, as
the President will be
campaigning
on his behalf tonight, and over the course of the weekend. Mitch McConnell won't
be there, given his dismal approval rating (18% or so), but millions of dollars
of his money will be. Most
polls
give Moore a slight edge, but Alabama is one of the hardest states to poll (due
to restrictive laws designed to curtail pollsters and telemarketers), so there
should be a fair bit of drama on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, it turns out that it's not just Donald Trump who could use a new
spell-checker. Moore's campaign prepared a large-format ad that has been
plastered
to the sides of buses in Alabama. It includes a URL for Moore's campaign
website, alabamadeservesmoore.com. Or it was supposed to, but due to a typo, the
URL on the sides of Alabama's buses is actually alabamaderservesmoore.com (note
the extra "r"). The Democrat who will be facing off against Moore/Strange in
December, Doug Jones, has already purchased the misspelled domain name and
redirected it
to his own campaign website. There are certainly much worse ways to spend
twenty bucks of a campaign's funds. (Z)